Python 2.4 is now in bugfix-only mode; no new features are being added. At
least 80 bugs have been squished since Python 2.4.3, including a number
of bugs and potential bugs found by with the
Coverity
and Klocwork static analysis tools. We'd like
to offer our thanks to both these firms for making this available for open
source projects - see their websites if you're interested.

Python 2.5 is the latest release of Python. This release of
the older 2.4 code is to provide bug fixes for people who are still using
Python 2.4. This is the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series -
future maintenance releases of Python will be in the 2.5 series, starting
of course with 2.5.1.

This is a final release, and is suitable for production use. There was
one change since the release candidate. This fixed a problem with cross-
compiling Python that was introduced between 2.4.3 and 2.4.4c1.

Windows users may also be interested in Mark Hammond's
pywin32 package,
available from
Sourceforge.
pywin32 adds a number of Windows-specific extensions to Python, including COM support and the Pythonwin IDE.

Other platforms

The bzip2-compressed version is considerably smaller, so get that one if
your system has the appropriate tools to deal
with it.

Unpack the archive with tar -zxvfPython-2.4.4.tgz (or
bzcat Python-2.4.4.tar.bz2 | tar -xf -).
Change to the Python-2.4.4 directory and run the "./configure", "make",
"make install" commands to compile and install Python. The source archive
is also suitable for Windows users who feel the need to build their
own version.